This black-figure belly amphora depicts hoplites — heavily-armored Greek infantry — flanked by lions and sphinxes in the characteristic decorative-narrative composition of Attic black-figure pottery of the mid-sixth century BCE. The vase is one of the canonical sources for the iconography of the hoplite warrior: the round shield (hoplon, ~90 cm bronze), the Corinthian helmet covering the face, the bronze cuirass, the greaves at the shins, the spear.

The hoplite warrior was the citizen-soldier of the Greek city-states from approximately the 8th to the 4th century BCE. The hoplite formation — phalanx of overlapping shields, eight ranks deep — was the dominant infantry tactic of the Greek world; it produced the victories at Marathon (490 BCE), Thermopylae (480 BCE), Plataea (479 BCE), and Salamis (480 BCE) that defeated the Persian invasions and that — in the historical narrative of the West — established the precedent of citizen-armies defending free constitutional cities.

The amphora is in the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes. The black-figure technique — figures painted in slip that fires black against the red-orange Attic clay, details incised with a sharp tool — was developed in Corinth in the 7th century BCE and refined at Athens by the workshop of Sophilos and the Amasis Painter through the 6th century. The amphora is the canonical commercial vessel of Mediterranean trade in this period; ten thousand of them have been excavated from contexts across the Mediterranean and Black Sea trading network.